Molyneux Says Talking to Press About Early Ideas Is a Mistake

22 Cans co-founder Peter Molyneux has made his first public appearance following a big controversy in February around the developer’s game Godus, which failed to deliver on the rewards promised on its Kickstarter page, game features, and a life changing experience for one player.

According to a report in GameIndustry.biz, Molyneux didn’t address the controversy directly at the Dubrovnik Reboot Festival, but he did talk about a problem he’s had throughout his career: breaking promises.

“At that time I started making this terrible mistake,” Molyneux said, speaking of the E3 he spent pitching Fable to the press. “Oh God. I feel like curling up into a ball and just withering away. The mistake I made, and I’ve made it again and again and again, and if I ever do this again I’ll probably still make it, the mistake I made is to go and talk to the press about my current ideas. As you can see, from the iterative development side, the current idea seems like the most exciting thing ever. It seems like it will fit, but sometimes you have to throw it away.”

Molyneux said his job was to get the press at E3 excited about the game, so he talked about the ideas that he would love to see in a role-playing game. For example, he said he would love it if the world was able to evolve to the point where if a player planted an acorn, it would grown into a tree over time.

“To my utter horror, that became the headline. Fable will have acorns growing trees. And of course it didn’t. The result was that everybody leapt on it. People were so incensed. This is why you have to watch yourself with the press. I wasn’t lying. People actually said, ‘This is fraud, you should be arrested.’ The same thing is happening in today’s world.”

22 Cans is still working on Godus, but the game’s co-creator Jack Attridge, referred to as Peter Molyneux’s “protege,” has recently left the studio.